Millions of people worldwide suffer from a wide variety of diseases or conditions that would benefit from the effective delivery of therapeutic or diagnostic agents. Examples of these diseases or conditions include pulmonary diseases, circulatory diseases, muscular diseases, bone diseases, and cancers.
Current drug delivery treatment options can often be ineffective due to inefficient delivery of an active ingredient to a targeted site. The use of nanoparticles as drug delivery vehicles has been employed for a variety of indications. Nanoparticles, for example, have been shown to improve the dissolution of poorly water-soluble drugs and enhance the transport of drugs both intra- and paracellularly. In addition, literature indicates that plasmid DNA can be effectively delivered by polycationic polymers that form nanoparticles when mixed with DNA resulting in enhanced gene expression. Although nanoparticles offer several advantages for delivering drugs (e.g. improved dissolution of low solubility API, intracellular and transcellular transport, etc.), the use of nanoparticles, for example, can be hindered by the inability to deliver nanoparticles to the site of drug action (e.g. dried nanoparticles are too small to deposit efficiently in the lungs, can avoid detection by APCs, etc.). In addition, nanoparticles are often difficult to handle at an industrial scale.